Project Guidelines

Central to this class is a team-based approach to conceive and design a new product and present a prototype in the
final class session. The goal of this exercise is to learn principles and methods of product development, to improve
teamwork skills and to appreciate the inherent multidisciplinary nature of product development. Project ideas come
from the students in the class. Guidelines for reasonable projects are given below.
Project Teams
In the second week of the course, we will form project teams on the basis of expressed student preferences. Teams
will consist of about 4 students. Once you are assigned to a project team, we expect you to stay in the course for the
entire term.

Project Materials and Expenses

Each team will try to limit their budget to a max amount of 4 mil VND. Lab 105, 107 can be used for your projects,
however, you need to learn to operate the machines by yourselves (which require trainings), or you can use any
external fabrication services.

Project Constraints
While special cases will be considered, you are strongly encouraged to choose a project satisfying all of the following
constraints:

 There should be a demonstrable market for the product. One good way to verify a market need is to identify
existing products that attempt to meet the need. Your product need not be a variant of an existing product, but
the market need addressed by your product should be clearly evident. The product does not need to have a
tremendous economic potential, but should at least be an attractive opportunity for an established firm with
related products and/or skills.
 Most products developed in this class are material goods and not services. While many of the ideas in the
course apply to services and software products (for example, customer needs and product architecture),
many do not (for example, design for manufacturing). Nevertheless, the faculty are willing to hear project
proposals from students interested in developing software, services, and internet-based enterprises.
 The product should have a high likelihood of containing fewer than 10 parts. Although you cannot anticipate the
design details, it is easy to anticipate that an electric drill will have more than 10 parts and that a garlic press can
have fewer than 10.
 You should be confident of being able to prototype the product for less than 4 mil VND. For example, a razor like
Gillette's Mach3 may have about 10 parts, but would require tens of thousands of dollars to create a functional
prototype.
 The product should require no basic technological breakthroughs. (Yes, a more compact airbag would be a nice,
but can you do it without inventing a new chemical?) You do not have time to deal with large technological
uncertainties.
 You should have access to more than five potential users of the product (more than 20 would be nice). For
example, you would have great difficulty researching agricultural irrigation systems without leaving Cambridge.
A Few More Hints
 Save any highly proprietary ideas for another context; we will be quite open in discussing the projects in class
and do not wish to be constrained by proprietary information.
 Most successful projects tend to have at least one team member with strong personal interest in the target
market.
 It is really nice to have a connection to a commercial venture that may be interested in the product. (One group
signed a licensing agreement with a major mail order and retail company with which they had made contact
during the first week of the course. The product they developed became a commercial success.)
 Most products are really not very well designed. This is evidenced by the seemingly poor quality of common
consumer products (utility knives, garlic presses, and ice cream scoops, for example). The experience in this
class is that if you pick almost any product satisfying the above project guidelines, you will be able to develop a
product that is superior to everything currently on the market. A book titled The Design of Everyday Things by
Donald A. Norman (Doubleday, 1990) discusses good and bad examples and provides principles and guidelines
for good design.
 Just because you have used a lousy product doesn't mean that a better one doesn't exist. Dosome thorough
research to identify competitive products and solutions.
 An overview of some previous class projects is available.